On Tuesday of this week I was showing some nice folks around the San Jose area. As part of our tour, we stopped in at Valley Christian High School (south San Jose – Santa Teresa area). The sky was clear and the views spectacular!  (Disclaimer – in this photo, the sky ended up looking white, so I did tinker with the color.)

From here we were looking at the Santa Teresa Foothills ((lowest, closest hills).  In front of them are the Santa Teresa & Blossom Valley areas of San Jose.  Behind them is Almaden Valley.

Along the coastal range in back, the peak on the far right (with a flat area) is Mt. Umunhum.  To the far left, the higher peaks are where you’ll find Loma Prieta.

Mount Umunhum sits high on the Santa Cruz Mountain range, and from there enjoys spectacular views. Looking inland, you can see San Jose & most of Santa Clara County, on a clear day even as far north as San Francisco from Mt. Umunhum. Turning toward the Pacific Ocean, from Mt. Umunhum’s heights you can see Santa Cruz and Monterey on a fogless day.

This magnificent land is now owned by the public, but there’s no public access yet. For some history and an explanation, take in this video from the Mid Peninsula Open Space Preserve:

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We may be in a recession with 11% local unemployment, but affordable homes are getting scooped up with multiple offers and in many areas, inventory is shrinking.

Today we’ll look at five areas of San Jose which offer at least some, if not mostly, entry level housing: Blossom Valley, Cambrian Park, Evergreen, Santa Teresa and South San Jose.

Evergreen does have some high-end housing in Silver Creek and elsewhere, but it also provides some very affordable homes for first time home buyers.  Cambrian Park is mostly middle class but it, too, has some McMansions (original Cambrian Park tract with large lots and very old homes that are not infrequently bulldozed) and some homes with views (Vista Loop area, bordering Los Gatos and Almaden Valley).  Blossom Valley has some beautiful properties and many close to thecenics Santa Teresa Foothills.  Overall, though, these homes represent affordable or mid-range houses for sale in Silicon Valley.  When we look at them as a group, it gives a strong sense of what the market is doing generally.

The months of inventory reflect how long it would take the current inventory to be absorbed (or sold off) if no new inventory came on the market and sales continued at the current pace.  Six months is a balanced market.  Fewer represents a seller’s market and more reflects a buyer’s market.  As you can see, April shows a push in all five districts of San Jose into seller’s territory:

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Silicon Valley home values are dropping, but it may not be as bad as you think. If you only read the headlines, you might think that the value of homes across the south bay has dropped 41% in the last year.  For example, Friday’s print edition of the San Jose Mercury news screams in its headline, “Median Home Price Dives 41%”. ( The online edition had a milder headline, Santa Clara County median home price plunges, sales rise.)

Have home prices really dropped 41% from a year ago?  No. (But it is critically important to know how much values are dropping, especially if you put your home on the market.)  The median home price is the number at which half of all sales were higher and half lower than that number.   For instance, if you had three homes sell, one at $300,000, one at $500,000 and one at $501,000, the “median home price” would be $500,000.   If you had five sell at $100,000 and three sell at $2,000,000, the median would be $100,000. You can see the problem.

What the median home price does explain is market heat, or where the market is most active.  Often, the median price tracks home values – but not always. And this is one of those times.

So how much value has been lost? It will vary from area to area, sometimes even block by block.  Loss in value will be tied to when either you bought the home or when your area was at its peak.  For many parts of San Jose and Silicon Valley, that peak was about 2 years ago, late 2006 to early 2007.

The best way to know what home values are doing is to study the comps, or the comparable home sales. It is easiest to do this in a tract neighborhood (we have no shortage of those in Santa Clara County).

For example, in the South San Jose zip code area of 95138, I took a sample tract home floorplan of 1355 square feet and charted it back over the last ten  years.    Here’s what the average price per SF was for that floorplan per year:

2009   $321.03  just one so far – $435,000
2008   $362.45   av sales price $483,870
2007   $470.55  av sales price $637,595
2006   $492.15  av sales price  $666,863
2005   $453.26  av sales price  $614,167
2004   $407.06  av sales price $551,566
2003   $332.39  av sales price  $450,388
2002   $334.46  av sales price $453,193
2001   $304.80  av sales price  $413,004
2000  $318.25  av sales price  $431,288
1999   $225.09  av sales price $304,996
1998   $205.35  av sales price  $278,249
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If you are thinking of buying a home in Silicon Valley, there are things you want to know upfront so that you make an informed decision. Because the most important factor is “location, location, location”, and because once you buy a home you can’t change it, you’ll need to know some location-specific things, including:

• where are the earthquake fault lines?
• where are the geologic hazard zones, such as liquifaction areas?
• where are the flood plains?
• where are man-made things that will negatively or positively impact a home’s value? Things such as
  • train lines
  • freeways
  • high voltage power lines
  • school district boundaries
  • zip code boundaries
  • proximity to entertainment venues

When looking at maps, sometimes these items show up and sometimes they don’t. Realtors and other real estate professionals in the San Jose area often use a Barclay’s Locaide to locate the natural hazard areas. Google maps can help uncover some other areas, but sometimes it raises more questions than it answers. (Last year a Realtor who doesn’t know the Belwood of Los Gatos area too well phoned me to ask what the object showing up in the hills of Belgatos Park was – it is just a covered resevoir, but it was not identified on the map and concerned some buyers. Local knowledge is still very helpful.)

Tonight I spent some time zooming in on Google Maps, using the satellite view, and idenified many of the paths of the high voltage power lines running through Los Gatos and nearby areas, such as Saratoga, Cupertino, Almaden Valley, Santa Teresa, and South San Jose.

Below, please find the fruit of that labor. I do not claim to have tracked all of the high voltage power lines in the west valley area of Santa Clara County, but I think I got many – maybe even most – of them. I hope you find the information helpful!

View Larger Map

Here in the Valley of Hearts Delight, aka Silicon Valley, the market continues to be a buyers market with downward pressure on prices, longer days on market, and bigger gaps between list price and sales price. What is happening area wide or county wide is not always exactly what we find in smaller market areas. Some parts of Silicon Valley, and some price points, are doing quite well relatively, while others are falling through the floor.

What is happening with San Jose real estate? Let’s look at four San Jose districts, mostly in the west valley area, by their zip code (or main zip): Almaden Valley (95120), Willow Glen (95125), Cambrian Park (95124) and West San Jose (95129).
Below, please find the trends for the median list price of single family homes for sale in these four areas of San Jose:
 
For the most part, it appears that the west valley area of San Jose real estate is continuing to experience noticeable declines in list prices throughout these districts. Interestingly, Almaden Valley and West San Jose (zip 95129) both saw improvement in spring before returning to the downward trend. By comparison, how is San Jose as a whole (the entire city) looking?
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